How would you imagine it feels for a transgender person to be constantly denied the right to identity their own gender? Consider what it would be like if every day someone came up to you and told you that you were lying about who you really are.
Kat Hache of TheDailyDot takes on Henry Blodget of Business Insider for doing just that.
Blodget got to it really fast...in his headline: The Highest Paid Woman CEO Was Born a Man. The implication he's striving for should slap you in the face...as it does us transpeople: What Blodget really means is, "The highest paid woman CEO is not really a woman."
Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times was less direct that Blodget, but it was there, after several paragraphs.
The highest-paid woman on the Equilar list was born a man.
Martine Rothblatt, born Martin Rothblatt, was the married father of four children and started Sirius Satellite Radio, now SiriusXM, before undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 1994. After one of her children was diagnosed with a disease, she founded United Therapeutics in 1996 and helped develop a drug to treat the illness. Last year, she was paid $38 million in compensation, most of it in stock options, putting her at No. 10 on the list. She declined to be interviewed.
Was it necessary to supply Rothblatt's former name...to use the word "father" rather than the gender-neutral "parent," or mention that she underwent gender reassignment surgery
20 years ago.
Miller buried what was important.
When Martine Rothblatt's child was ill, she founded the company United Therapeutics to develop the drug to treat the illness.
This was after she had gender confirmation surgery, when she was legally female.
Her equity grant is awarded based on company performance, the best way to be aligned with the interests of shareholders.
--Andrew Fisher, United Therapeutics
So she earned $38 million in compensation, which earned her #10 on the list of CEO compensations. The company's stock price more than doubled last year because the FDA approved a new drug,
Orenitram (treprostinil), a prescription drug which is used to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (high blood pressure in the lungs) in adults.
Oh yeah, Martine did also found another company in the year during which she had her surgery. It was known as Sirius Satellite Radio.
Maybe the thing is, Martine is just more intelligent than most people. Well, probably not me, but most people :-) ...Martine was clearly more business orientated than I am...as I have not one entrepreneurial molecule in my body.
Martine was born in Chicago, grew up in Southern California, child of a dentist who worked for The Retail Clerks Union. Martine's grandfather was the Chicago labor organizer Isadore Rothblatt. Martine's mother was a speech therapist at San Diego State University. Her sister is Janet Lawrence-Berkowitz who was a corporate executive in the software development field and now is a global project manager. Martine's paternal grandparents immigrated from Odessa, Ukraine and her maternal grandparents are from Poland.
After two years of college, she left college to travel the world, eventually reaching a NASA tracking station in the Seychelles, where it struck her that satellite communications could unite the world. She returned to UCLA, graduating summa cum laude in communications studies with a thesis on international direct broadcast satellites. As a result of a project performed for Professor Harland Epps , she became an active member of the L-5 Society and OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Space Industrialization and Settlement). After gaining her undergraduate degree, she went through a 4-year joint law-MBA program at UCLA, during which she published 5 articles about satellite communications and prepared a business plan for Hughes Space and Communication Group, entitled PanAmSat, about how satellite spot beam technology could be used to provide communication service to Latin American countries. she also wrote for the OASIS newsletter. Graduating in 1981...the same year I myself got my PhD in mathematics at Oregon...Martine joined the DC law firm Covington & Burling in order to represent the television broadcasting industry before the FCC in the areas of direct broadcast satellites and use of full-spectrum for communication. In 1982 she left to study astronomy at the University of Maryland...when NASA retained her to obtain approval for the IEEE c-band system on its data relay and tracking satellites. And the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Radio Frequencies retained her to safeguard radio astronomy quiet bands used for deep space research, also before the FCC. And also that year she was retained by Gerard K. O'Neil to handle business and regulatory matters for his new technology, Geostar. In 1984 she was hired by the founder of the Spanish International Network to implement her PanAmSat MBA thesis as a new company that would complete with Intelsat. So she discontinued her astronomy studies and consulting work in 1986 to become full-time CEO of Geostar Corporation. She left in 1990 to create WorldSpace (a satellite radio network in the third world) and Sirius Satellite Radio.
After her daughter was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, Martine created the PPH Cure Foundation, created the biotech firm United Therapeutics, obtained a PhD in medical ethics at the Barts and London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London in 2001, with a dissertation on the conflict between private and public interests in xenotransplantation (transplantation of living cells from one species to another), later published as Your Life or Mine.
In 2004 Rothblatt launched the transhumanist Terasem Movement. She blogs at Mindfiles, Mindware and Mindclones.
Joe Rogan with Martine Rothblatt and Bina48:
She also vlogs with Ulrike Reinhard:
So tell me...was it really necessary to disparage her attainments simply because she is a transwoman?
She is a hero, not a villain. She didn't deserve this treatment. None of us do.